


the fourth fact

by watfordbird33



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Not A Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:34:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21932332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watfordbird33/pseuds/watfordbird33
Summary: The point of the dream was that the chessboard had two sides and he was on one side and Rey was on the other. The point of the dream was that there didn’t need to be darkness or Palpatine or the First Order to keep them apart.To be together would be a rebellion in and of itself. It would mend worlds; it would crack them.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	the fourth fact

**Author's Note:**

> This is my heart put down on a page and as such has not been researched nor edited.

He hits the ground so hard he blacks out. 

This is a fact.

There are four more facts and they come in order and the first is Rey’s face bone-white and the second is his mother’s voice and the third is his saber spiraling out over the ocean and the fourth—

Ben.

Ben?

There are still parts of him that are Kylo Ren.

There are still parts of him that are Kylo Ren, but they do not look like this boy doubled up and forced open and thrown to the bottom of a pit.

When Snoke had no faith in him he told him that Exogol would chew him up and spit him out. He told him what darkness looked like. Half darkness is an illusion. Snoke’s face looms up in stark relief, vanishes like one more father. Half darkness is an illusion. Pigment slapped together to obscure. Darkness is the absence of light, a returning to what was, a rebirth, a cataclysm. Later, he thought about Palpatine crawling his way up through that absence like a blind worm, helpless and hating. He thought about Rey’s face upturned like a petal to the sun.

He doesn’t know the fourth fact and he can’t remember it.

He reaches out.

It’s the feeling when you miss the step you’re waiting for and the next thing coming is a fall. The thing after that is impact but you’re so bruised and bitter and shock-blue from the space you’ve just stepped into that you can’t even see that far ahead.

He gropes again—misses.

Misses?

Miss implies a lack thereof. A lack thereof. A lack. A lack of Rey.

Once he dreamed that there was no darkness and no Palpatine and no First Order but instead a great wash of cosmic space and in the middle of it there was a chessboard. He sat on one side. Rey sat on the other. She leaned over the chessboard and her shirt gapped open but that wasn’t the point of the dream.

Ben.

He remembers looking at his name written down in the sand. He remembers stepping onto it. First there was no destruction, only acknowledgement, and then he wiped it clean. Someone was watching and they wore a mask like he would soon. Until he wore his mask he pulled back his hair so he could see himself as he wrote his new name in the sand.

His mother didn’t speak to him then. She waited a long time. She waited a long time.

The point of the dream was that the chessboard had two sides and he was on one side and Rey was on the other. The point of the dream was that there didn’t need to be darkness or Palpatine or the First Order to keep them apart.

To be together would be a rebellion in and of itself. It would mend worlds; it would crack them.

In the dream he swept the pieces off the chessboard and while he was kissing Rey they all came back. They walked up in their flickering blue light across the board and they swarmed into the hole in his side and killed him from the inside out.

He doesn’t know the fourth fact and he can’t remember. 

Rey’s face bone-white.

His mother’s voice.

His saber spiraling out over the ocean.

And.

The Jedi find sabers when they come of age. He lost his. He lost his on purpose and he does not regret it and he would do all of it again and again a thousand times but that doesn’t explain why he keeps reaching for it.

His mother will not tell him why.

A lack of Rey?

He can’t fathom it.

And yet.

He thinks about holding the ship in midair and knowing the Wookie wasn’t on it, knowing the Wookie was safe on the other transport, bellowing and carrying on, and knowing Rey didn’t know. Knowing the only thing keeping her alive was that frail string of power between them.

He wanted her to see it.

He?

Ben.

Kylo Ren.

Ben. He.

He wanted her to see it. Their bond and the way it consumed. Consumes. Consumed. 

He is afraid of the past tense. He keeps slipping into it and he keeps reaching and groping and falling for something that refuses to exist. He is the smallest he has ever been and his knees are bruised because Palpatine threw him into the pit. Like his grandfather, his grandfather, his grandfather Darth Vader a Sith a father. Like the fathers who keep leaving him. 

He keeps missing the step. Then he steps down and misses it again.

In between the facts there are things that cannot be facts and one of them is Vader’s helmet lying on his chest. It spurts and glowers and it tells him Exogol will chew him up and spit him out. It is Snoke. It is Hux. It is Rey, hating him, and Rey gone. Rey bent and broken and spasming beside him with their bond exposed in light. He was so naked and they both were and Palpatine held them, their naked selves and where they joined. 

His mother told him—

Ben.

His mother told him not to be in a hurry, not to get up and grow up and go away fast, she said there was too much peace to be at war with himself but somehow even then he was scrambling for an outcome he couldn’t name and maybe all it was then was the way he felt when he lay awake at night and felt someone else’s heart beat in his chest but he can’t help thinking that there was this dark place in him from the beginning like a great ugly seed blooming out of him just waiting for someone to come along and _take it—_

Someone else’s heart.

In the dream when the chess pieces found the inside of his rib cage he didn’t have a heart. And then Rey held up her hand and showed him where she held it. He thought it would be safe there.

He’s looking for the fourth fact.

Rey’s face bone-white. 

If she had taken his hand—

And whose hand would it have been?

Rey’s face bone-white. Over the chessboard where they sat in the middle of the Force. And the point of the dream was that the chessboard had two sides. 

Vader is lying on his chest and his father is leaving and his mother forgets his name. She calls him Luke and she tells him not to grow up and go away too fast. And Vader is lying on his chest. He’s choking him. He’s choking him and there’s nothing but the slapped-on grief of it tight around his throat. He killed so many this way. He lifted them up and threw them and hid behind his gloves because then he wouldn’t have to feel. He wouldn’t have to be Ben holding someone’s throat with a slippery aching Force grip and twisting until their face goes blue. Then white. White-bone-white.

He opens his eyes and there’s no pit. There’s no darkness.

There’s no darkness of either kind, no darkness pretending to be any other sort of darkness, no pigment, no light, but there’s Rey, and she’s dead.

First and foremost he has always been a fool.

He doesn’t know how to live in a world that’s full of light.

Ben.

Ben?

He.

If he doesn’t have their bond he doesn’t know what he has except for maybe the constant whiplash of falling down the stairs. He can keep falling. He can keep coming and stumbling and crawling and falling and it never dulls the hurt.

There is blood on her face.

The bond is a love letter that she can’t sign and an obituary that he can’t write and he is climbing to his feet. He is pushing Vader aside. He is breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and this is the fourth fact.

The fourth fact is not his mother or the saber or Snoke or Palpatine or Exogol or the Sith or the Jedi or Han or even the Force.

There is blood on her face and without her he’s a hole in someone else’s heart. He’s the tragedy his father was before he died. He’s caving. He erodes and he falls away and at the bottom of him there’s an empty space with a chessboard in the middle and her heart stands in for the queen.

He loves her.

He loves her immovably.

It’s as if someone took hold of the basest bottom of his soul and wrenched it out of him and discarded it and told him you will never be enough. And told him you will never be hers. And told him you are nothing. And told him you cannot be anything more than every bit of half darkness that has ever come before you.

Pigment slapped together to obscure.

Obscure. He obscures. He, Ben.

Ben.

Kylo Ren.

Kylo.

Han broke him. He chewed him up and spat him out and it was not the end of things and it was not the end of the darkness but it was a goddamn start.

Her self is in his hands and so he’s careful as he climbs.

The fourth fact is this.

Rey?

The fourth fact is that he’s going to die. And not only that but that he _has _to die. And not only that but that he’s willing to die. And not only that but that if he doesn’t die, he’ll never live again.

She is a piece of him broken off jaggedly, and Palpatine found the scar on either end and held it until it sparked like a live wire doubled and burned him so deeply he forgot the name he scratched out of the sand.

He wanted her to see their bond and he wanted her to see what taking his hand would do to them and how it would push them out of the darkness together but all alone. He envisioned the space and the Force and the chessboard except they were sitting on the same side. 

He dreamed she sat at the end of his bed and looked at him and there were stars in her pinned-up hair.

He dreamed she fell and he offered her a hand and she took it and it did not mend a world or crack it.

He dreamed of his mother. She wore Vader’s mask, and softened it, but when he put it on it hurt him like a brand. He woke up sweating. Ben. He knew he had Vader’s face. He knows. He misses the step and Vader is waiting for him and under Vader Snoke and under Snoke Palpatine and they are always leaving but the ground at the bottom catches him every time. Ben there’s no need—there’s no need to be gentle. There’s no need. His father turns away. He has his jawline and his offset eyes. He looks more like his father when he laughs. He never laughs. He forgot how. He knows the fourth fact, and he laughs. He will die for Rey. This is the fourth fact and he cannot forget it now.

Rey.

If he doesn’t die, he’ll never live again.

And she is so absolutely tender and broken, she is the curve of something naked and exposed, and he stumbles to her, he falls, he breaks, he falls, he gets up, he falls again. His hands are bleeding. He wades in the dust and Palpatine could not keep him in the pit. He could not keep him down. He is his father and his grandfather and his mother and his grandmother and he is more than all of them because he kept his name.

Ben.

He wades in the dust and he is at her side.

At her side. On her side.

The chessboard is forgotten and this, too, is right.

His mother didn’t speak to him. She waited a long time. She waited until the ocean rose and roared up over them like a flame.

Something else is rising and it is rising with the blazing certainty of Rey itself and it is shining as bright as anything has ever shone down here within the temple that smells of rot and filth and blood and darkness and it is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen and there is a fifth fact, a fifth fact—there is a fifth fact, and it is all around him, it is in Rey’s pinned-up hair. The blood on her face. His mother speaking now and his father and the Jedi who came and stood against Palpatine and what the half darkness obscured is gone.

The fifth fact.

Her hand comes up to his and she says his name.

Ben.

Ben.

Ben.

There is no more mask and no more unreconciled names.

Without the mask, he kisses her. And without a name, he smiles.

There is a great wrench and a lurch and he falls back into space and. And  there is the chessboard, reset.

Exogol, Snoke said, an ending.

A beginning of things. A beginning. A beginning. A beginning. 


End file.
